The Old Four Calling Birds
Posted by Lizzie on 12/17/05
Today’s reading: Eat Your Book; It’s Good For You (Don’t know WTF this is about? Click here.)
We so wish we had our never-ran review of Lydia Millet‘s Everyone’s Pretty at hand. We know it used words like “exuberant,” “thrilling,” “phantasmagor”— well, perhaps it’s better we don’t have that review on hand after all. Let not the author suffer from our thesaurus abuse, however.
How hot will you be if you win Gilbert Sorrentino’s forthcoming A Strange Commonplace? It doesn’t exist on Amazon. It doesn’t exist on the web. It’s not even on the publisher’s website, motherfucker! Behold the image of the author himself, which must suffice until you and only you can crack its embargoed cover and devour its contents. (That is, of course, if by “you and only you”, you mean “you, after the Old Hag had her treacherous fill.”)
Theme: Oh No You Didn’t
We have a confession. We really hate modernist authors. We really hate “experimental” or “meta”-fiction. WE HATE ANY BOOKS WITHOUT THE NAMES “WHARTON”, “DICKENS” OR “LEWIS” ON THE COVER. That said, we’ve actually read the authors above and, to our dismay, enjoyed them very much. Somehow, however, that doesn’t stop us from lying about other authors without even noticing. Say “Bruno Schultz,” for instance. We’ll nod. “Calvino.” We retain none of it — except the nodding thing. But we’re not going to make this a boring “What author do you lie about having read” thing, because we don’t want to crack our comment capacity. We want the thing you lie about without even noticing in your basic life. For instance, we, apparently, run five miles a day, are really into yoga, cook with fresh herbs, love to travel, and rarely interrupt people in conversation. We have never had our sole activity be walking to our car for a month or our primary meal a bowl of Chex and an apple. Never. NEVER. We don’t know what you’re talking about.
Unwitting dissemblers? Come to comments.
Filed under: Lit-ish |
I left the office at 4:15. Really.
Comment by Kate Dino — 12/17/2005 @ 5:13 pm
I did not spend my week off in bed pretending to read my students’ final essays, living solely on granola bars and water, not having the least idea what the weather was like outside.
Comment by ing — 12/17/2005 @ 9:47 pm
I did not eat half of my son’s Hanukkah gelt, one or two pieces a night, after he went to bed. Nor did I nibble on his chocolate dreidel, beyond the piece he’d already generously alloted me.
Comment by Genevieve — 12/29/2005 @ 5:11 pm